It looks like the Doctor isn't regenerating from this one, and to be honest, I'm not sad to see the show go. I was a fan of "Doctor Who" for years and years, but much like someone watching a family member slowly die of painful cancer, I'm relieved that it's passed on.
As you may or may not have heard, rumors are circulating that the show is being shelved after a free fall in viewership that was never concretely arrested. Like many other franchises, the show went from a cultural mainstay to another item in the reject pile, thanks to overt messaging and ideological self-insertions from its writers and producers.
As I covered in 2023, the last time I'd written about the show, the Doctor got busy insulting men and pushing a transgender agenda. This was after it had completely ruined its lore by haphazardly inserting a whole new origin story for the Doctor that not only didn't make any sense, it cheapened the character significantly.
*As I was writing this, news came out that the BBC rejected the rumors that the show was being put on ice after this last season, especially as the current Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, is making his way to the exit. Regardless of whether the BBC is actually telling the truth, I'm going to continue writing this article as if the show is officially dead... because it is.*
And I think that's probably where the Doctor died, because the show stopped being a program that contained interesting plots with fun ideas, interesting villains, and engaging plot twists, and was effectively a delivery system for the ideas of U.K. elitists, which are increasingly being rejected. In other words, it was basic propaganda, that few people were willing to swallow.
Message-first storytelling is a plague that has claimed so many beloved franchises and properties that there's a very real hatred of it developing in various parts of the globe, especially in the U.S., where rejection of the woke was boiling under a lid that could no longer contain the spillover.
The thing is, wokeness is combative and aggressive by its very nature. This means that, in order for it to get its point across, it has to attack something first, and that's usually a long-held and proven tradition, a known truth, or an innocent group of people. A woke movie can't make its point without making enemies first; the only trouble with that is, the people woke productions have to make enemies of is effectively everyone.
The underlying message is, "you're guilty of social sins and in order to absolve yourself, you must accept everything I'm saying without question and deny yourself, your intelligence, what you know to be real, your country, and sometimes, even your God." Sometimes, it's a combination of those, too often it's all of them.
And that's what "Doctor Who" did after a time. It spoke down to its audience and then expected that same audience to love and appreciate the abuse. To be sure, this is what a lot of woke productions did, and that's why the vast majority of them are burning to the ground with very few exceptions. It's not just a bad method of storytelling, it's a bad business model.
It's a method that forgets that what makes a successful show is, ultimately, its fans, not its ability to convey social change. The elitists seem to have been bubbled for so long that they see widespread agreement with a show by the unwashed masses as a sure sign that you're doing something wrong. If the "ignorant" love it, then you're doing anything to move the societal needle, and that is a horrifying thought to people who think they're ideologically superior to you.
I'll definitely miss "Doctor Who" for what it was when it was at its height, a witty show featuring a larger than life protagonist. The madman with a box. However, what it is now needs to die a very quick death. In a handful of years or even a couple of decades, maybe the BBC — or whoever owns it at that point — can try to restart the show, giving it the respect it deserves. Nothing would please me more than to see the Doctor return in full form, but what we have now isn't even the Doctor. It's not even a shadow of what the Doctor was.
It's a knock off wearing a "Doctor Who" mask. An activist's bad fan fiction that should have stayed on 2010s Tumblr.
